Word: reactors
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...facilities are safer than Soviet ones in other ways. Unlike Soviet nuclear reactors, all NRC-licensed American installations are equipped with emergency core-cooling systems. These usually work by dumping tons of water into any reactor core that shows signs of overheating. Nor are U.S. reactors as likely to release radiation into the atmosphere in the event that the fuel starts melting. Only the newest of the Soviet Union's Western-style reactors are equipped with the steel-reinforced concrete containment buildings that are designed to hold in radioactive gases and the other by-products of an accident. All licensed...
Thus began by far the gravest crisis in the troubled, 32-year history of commercial atomic power. A catastrophe had occurred over the weekend at the Chernobyl plant, 80 miles north of Kiev, where a reactor meltdown and explosion caused untold death and suffering and raised the prospect of long- term health and environmental damage on a far greater scale than anything yet unleashed by peaceful nuclear...
While Soviet pronouncements sought to minimize the extent of the damage, information gathered from satellite photos suggested a hellish scene at the accident site. All evidence pointed to a nuclear reactor fire burning out of control in the gentle, rolling Ukrainian countryside and steadily releasing radiation into the air. That makes the catastrophe unimaginably worse than the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, where a containment building kept most radioactive material from escaping out of the plant. The Chernobyl unit, by contrast, lacked such a protective structure...
Fueled by the white-hot graphite core of one of Chernobyl's four reactors, the runaway blaze burned at temperatures of up to 5000 degrees , or twice that of molten steel. The crippled reactor itself was unapproachable--too hot from the fire ravaging it, too dangerous radioactively. "No one knows how to stop it," said one U.S. expert. "It could take weeks to burn itself...
...reactor continued to burn, military helicopters reportedly flew over the site and dropped wet sand, lead and boron onto the burning reactor. Available evidence at week's end suggested that the fire was dying...